The answer is almost certainly going to be based on culture, history, art, religion, and related topics and not something specifically economic. My suggestion

The answer is almost certainly going to be based on culture, history, art, religion, and related topics and not something specifically economic. My suggestion would be to study the history of China and Japan in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially paying attention to how Japanese elites looked at Western ideas and technologies and thought about how to integrate them or exclude them from Japanese society. Note how their approach was different from that of China. The Kyoto School is a good example in the philosophy world. If you are up for reading fiction, the Asia series by James Clavell covers the economic history of both China (including Hong Kong) and Japan from the mid-19th century to the 1970s.